Tuning Valves Or Something....?

[kyle_baker]

hey, my uncle was listening to my car a while back and mentioned somehting about valves needing to be tuned up. He said he used to tune his old 1982 320i all the time by himself. Is this hard to do? he said its easy to get to them, just pull off the valve cover. he said he had never tuned up his e36, but that his old 320i was easy. can someone please explain to me what i need to do to tune them and how? please no discouraging comments, if at all possible i'd liek to do this myself, i'm trying to learn more about my car and how to keep it up on my own so please help and share the knowledge! thanx in advanced.

[thekid]

If the 6cly are as finiky about the valves as 4cly are then I hate to break this to you, but you get almost no room for valve adjustments in these cars. The engines are made to run one way... I do not remember the tolerance off hand that our engines have, but it is almost nill. However, should you feel that you need to do this, good luck to you and I hope some one can help you more than I.

Should you mean, replacing the valves or valve springs this is another matter entirely that can be done. Howewver, it requires either a camshaft tool, or you to trust your ability with handling parts that would cost you an arm and a leg to replace. And could very well just end up replacing your engine. It requires removing the cam shaft. And if it does not go back in exactly as it should, bye bye engine.

There is a way to do it with out the camshaft tool, but int he interests of not being the cause of you possibly breaking your engine, I will refrain from giving the instructions. Also having never done the procedure myself or seen it done, I could not give you all of the tips and tricks involved with doing it.

[kyle_baker]

oh ok, well i'd really rather not mess with the cams at all, my uncle just told me it should be fairly easy because his 82 320i was simple, but i guess with advancing technology the engines become more complicated. He talked like all i had to do was remove the valve cover and do some adjusting. Anyone know what he might ahve been talking about?

[dutchbmw]

The e36 (not sure about the 4 cyl. though) do have self adjusting hydraulic valves. So I don't know what he wants to adjust?? Ask him what he means by that!

[Gkamysz]

Yeah, all E36 engines have hydraulic lifters. No valve clearance adjustment needed. However if yours has a bad valve tick, there might be a bad lifter.

I adjusted valves with the old man in his Cummins diesel, it's easy.

[kyle_baker]

i'll try to find out what he was talking about, what about the ticking? is that hard to fix? that might be the problem.

[thekid]

The ticking is fairly common and not really a problem. I know in other cars it can be often be caused by a bad lifter as mentioned above. Or if he was hearing a noise, it could be bent valve springs. A very common problem on the 4cly's with a driver that likes hard downshifts without rev matching (if it's a 5spd)...